Commentary
Ocean City Today June 18, 2021
Page 41
How others view us is what counts A year ago on May 31, a video went viral after an Ocean City police officer slugged a young man in the head and put him in a chokehold for, ostensibly, resisting arrest. The youth was seated on a Boardwalk bench at the time and his crime leading to that confrontation was that he cursed and insulted the officer as the latter arrested his friend for a minor infraction. The officer who threw the haymaker was cleared roughly three weeks later, after a review of his actions found that he acted within the department’s use-of-force policy. The youth, against whom charges were also dropped, was White. The police overreaction shown on that video — it can be found in this paper’s online archives at oceancitytoday.com — would seem to answer the question being asked all over the country this week regarding two Boardwalk incidents involving police use of force against two young Black men: would the police have treated these men as harshly if they were White? It’s a sorry defense, but the actions some officers have exhibited over the years strongly suggests that the answer would be “yes,” and that last weekend’s Tasering of one man and the repeated knee-to-the ribs of another were not the racist incidents they have been made out to be in national news coverage. It could have happened to anyone. In the meantime, the local debate over the propriety of the kneeing/Tasering takedowns over vaping infractions is pointless in one respect: what we think doesn’t really matter. We can argue all we want that these kids had it coming or that the police were wrong, but — outside any ramifications the police department and its personnel might experience because of our opinions — it’s what the rest of the country believes about Ocean City that counts. We can blame whoever and whatever we want for our public relations difficulties, including wise-ass kids of all colors, bad elements coming to town, the police — who need to apply the use-of-force Goldilocks principle of not too much, not too little, but just right — and local officials who say everything is under control when it isn’t. But, like it or not, Ocean City is a business, a well-known commercial enterprise (that happens to have a residential population) that operates under a spotlight. People here are free to disagree in the most strenuous terms if they want, but it remains that this is just one more damn thing Ocean City doesn’t need out there when the city is spending $5.6 million a year trying to build a familyfriendly brand. It’s time to recognize that everyone is watching everyone else these days, that people are predisposed to believe whatever supports their suspicions or already established take on things, and that every day has to be an image-building day when the nation has its eye on you. Thumbing our noses at critics elsewhere in the country by contending we’re right and they’re wrong, doesn’t make them and the considerable influence they wield go away. Ocean City has to accept that and respond accordingly. EDITOR Stewart Dobson MANAGING EDITOR Lisa Capitelli STAFF WRITERS Greg Ellison, Neely James, Greg Wehner, Jack Chavez, Mallory Panuska ASSISTANT PUBLISHER Elaine Brady ACCOUNT MANAGERS Mary Cooper, Vicki Shrier
PUBLIC EYE
Perils of speaking up
By Stewart Dobson I am not, by the way, anticop, nor am I racist, and I operate according to the belief that people can be or do whatever they want as long as they don’t do it to me. Or do it to others who can’t stand up for themselves. It’s a character flaw that’s gotten me into big trouble over the years: a long time ago, a galoot of a guy on the other side of a crowded club insulted a woman sitting at a table near him just because he could, and here I am standing up when I should have shut up. It was, as they say, the old alligator mouth overloading the hummingbird rear-end scenario. “What did you say, you ********?” I yelled over the heads of a hundred other people. At least that’s what I heard coming out of my
mouth, while my mind was advising me to run for my car and get out of Dodge before this character curled me around one of his big fat hairy knuckles and compressed me into a shot glass. He was, in terms of scale, a full-course meal to my side salad, and yet, the big mouth gene clouded my thinking. The only thing that saved me was so many people were in the room that the galoot couldn’t tell exactly who said what and therefore settled down just in case the voice belonged to an even bigger someone who was looking to perform a little shot-glass compression trick of his own. Writing editorials doesn’t offer that kind of cover, unfortunately. You say what’s on your mind and suffer the consequences. On the editorial next door, for instance, I’m fairly certain everyone will find something they don’t like. Some mem-
CLASSIFIED/LEGAL MANAGER Nancy MacCubbin SENIOR DESIGNER Susan Parks GRAPHIC ARTIST Kelly Brown PUBLISHER Christine Brown ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT Gini Tufts
bers of the police department won’t care for it because I am critical, and the people who see racism in the actions of local police won’t like it because I disagree with them as well. You might say, in fact, that I have stayed the course of rarely agreeing with anyone, because taking things at face value is like reading the dust jacket and presuming you know what’s in the book. We’ve seen a lot of that in recent years. By now, you’re probably wondering if I ever had the you-know-what beaten out of me because I didn’t shut up. The answer is my head ended up sporting more knots than a crocheted circus tent after one episode. I would have had more of them, too, had not the police arrived to break up that brawl. You gotta love them, when they’re right.
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